EA Building 'Lots of New IPs' and 'Gigantic Action Games'

Electronic Arts is "building a lot of new IPs" around the world, according to Patrick Soderlund, Executive Vice President of EA Studios, and one of them at Jade Raymond’s Motive studio in Montreal is filling an important gap in EA’s development portfolio.

"If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don't have a lot," Soderlund told IGN. "EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin's Creed or Batman or GTA or those types of games that are really big. The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn't been done before."

The common thread among those franchises, of course, is that they’re open world games. I asked Soderlund if he was speaking specifically about Motive making a game at that scale.

"Maybe," he said. "I’m not suggesting we're going to go after GTA and sell 50 million units. We would love to! But what I'm saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do. And I think for us to do that, we need the right people."

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To accomplish this, Soderlund explained, "you need a leadership and people that have done this in the best and they've done it successfully in the past. That, coupled with a large ambition to invest in new IP. We want to. We're building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP."

Motive’s first project is assisting on Visceral’s unannounced Star Wars project, led by ex-Naughty Dog director Amy Hennig. Motive is also working on something new for EA that fits the big-budget action bill Soderlund is talking about.

"[Jade Raymond] wanted to try something different," Soderlund said. "She wanted to build action games and we were going in that direction…. It kind of came together, and that's why we did it."